Jeff Bridges is walking in his backyard, which consists of nineteen acres on top of a mountain overlooking the Southern California town of Montecito. Beyond Montecito, the Pacific Ocean opens up for thousands of miles, and beyond the ocean, the universe.

Just a few days ago, a long way from here, Bridges stood under lights at the Oscars and introduced the nominees for best actress, calling out their names in the voice of a loving God: ANNETTE! JENNIFER! NATALIE! Bridges might have had reason to be twice nervous, because he'd also been nominated for his own turn in True Grit, but he looked happy and comfortable. He looked exactly like a man who was in the middle of one of Hollywood's great runs, a man in possession of an almost impossible certainty — a man who has reached such great heights, up on his mountain, that even his mistakes will look like genius.

"Acting, man," he says now. "Believe me, I like life to come at me a little slower than that. I was just playing the calm guy."

It was the last acting he will do until the end of this, his sixty-first year. He's decided that this year, he's going to concentrate on making music rather than movies. Just now, when he's as famous as he's ever been, when the scripts are piling up against his door like leaves, he's choosing instead to live inside the recording studio he's built next to his old garage and sing.

"But I am taking advantage of the opportunity," he says, smiling with his eyes and his mouth. He smiles a lot. It's his default expression. "Now's the perfect time for me to do something like this."

A thick fog rolls up the mountain and rain begins falling out of the low sky, but Bridges is a man of ritual, which means he must walk before he goes to work. He has worn a great tangle of paths across his nineteen acres, carried by instinct in every possible direction. Today, he's pointed north. He walks like a big man, long strides and slow, with his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. He's wearing old jeans and a denim shirt unbuttoned at the wrists. His magnificent head of pewter hair is swept back off his lined forehead, carrying down past the back of his neck in waves. He shivers and squeezes out a fart, because that shit is poison, man, and it's better out than in.

"Do you like aloes?" he says, stopping to admire an enormous plant with fat spiky leaves and the faint remains of its blooms rising out the top of it. This particular aloe looks prehistoric. Bridges walks up and stands beside it — the plant is not that much smaller than he is — and then reaches out and tickles it under one of its leaves. "This guy likes to be scratched right here," he says, and he smiles some more. He is in love with his aloes, and he's a man who loves all the way. "If some crazy idea stays in my head for long enough, then there's no fighting it," he says. "I just say, Okay, let's go. Let's do this."

Bridges was sixteen or seventeen years old when he learned to stop fighting it. He had acted a few times — his first tearful lines onscreen were spoken to his black-and-white father, Lloyd, on an episode of Sea Hunt — but he wasn't sure that acting was what he wanted to do. He liked music better, experimenting with his brother Beau's guitar, along with other objects and instruments. His family had a beach house back then, down in Malibu, and one night, as he and some friends were leaving, he saw that they had left a light on deep inside the house. He went back to turn it off and click: He was in blackness.

"Normally, we push away the things we're scared of," Bridges says. "But for some reason, that night, I decided to let that fear in. I decided that it was okay for me to be afraid of the dark."

He imagined all those things that aren't there in the light. And by the time his friends came back inside and snapped on the lights — he had remained inside the darkened house for so long — they found him curled up in a ball on the floor, trembling and bathed in tears and sweat. He had opened the door to fear, and fear had rushed in.

"And then there was a rose," he says now, looking clear through the fog. A single rose, in a tiny vase, on a table. And he imagined that the rose hid the same things that the dark kept hidden, and he felt his heart start racing again. He was terrified of the rose, and that's the exact moment when Jeff Bridges learned the secret that would unlock the rest of his life. That night, he learned that there was no such thing as acting. There was only imagination, and that long succession of dreams and nightmares we all harbor. And if only he continued to let everything in — if all of us decided to let everything in — those things would join our imaginations and carry us wherever we might want to go.

Jeff Bridges clacks his teeth together like a horse and begins to head back down his mountain. "We're here for such a short period of time," he says. "Live like you're already dead, man. Have a good time. Do your best. Let it all come ripping right through you."

His beautiful guitar is there on its stand, in the middle of the floor, shining in the light. It is one of a kind. It is a perfect, hand-distressed modern replica of the Country Gentleman custom-made for the legendary Chet Atkins in 1959, with its distinctive telltale "single cutaway" where the neck meets the body. An intricate, elaborate leather strap with silver buckles hangs from it; BAD, the strap reads, in big block letters.

It is the guitar and strap Bridges played and wore in Crazy Heart. In that film — which he had resisted until he learned his friend T Bone Burnett was going to oversee the music for it — he earned an Academy Award for his portrayal of a drunk, washed-up country singer named Bad Blake. In the months before the start of filming, Bridges had worked his imagination very hard. Partly because of how he looks, but mostly because of how he talks, people sometimes think that Bridges is just a happy, blithe stoner type, easy come, easy go. He is in part those things, but he is also a meticulous preparer, a master of nuance. He asked musicians how they carry their guitars up onto the stage; he began writing smudged lyrics on scraps of paper late at night; he learned about the art and science of the long hauler's friend known as the trucker bomb, the emptying of which he included in an unscripted moment in the film. He wasn't pretending to be Bad Blake, just as he wasn't really pretending to be the calm guy at the Oscars; he became them.

Bridges sits down behind the mixing board. Behind him is a large painting of tornadoes that he painted himself. There are other paintings on the opposite wall — tribal abstracts, almost like cave paintings. On another wall, a series of black-and-white photographs (not by him) sits on a shelf: Captain Beefheart, with a cigar in his mouth, watches him work. So does Bob Dylan. So does his very young self, goofing off with a childhood friend named Johnny Goodwin, who grew up to become a songwriter and has spotted him some songs for his record.

Tacked up over the board are the lyrics to another song by another friend: "What a Little Love Can Do," by the late Stephen Bruton.

Among other things, Bruton helped Bridges become Bad Blake. They met on the set of Heaven's Gate more than thirty years ago, joined in an unlikely chain by Kris Kristofferson. Together, they spent six months occasionally filming a disastrous movie but mostly jamming in a Montana lodge with Ronnie Hawkins and a collection of good ol' boys. "We would have wild times," Bridges says, his eyes misting a little. "Oh, God." Bruton died of throat cancer in 2009. The song means a great deal to Bridges.

He gets ready to fire up what he's finished of his new album, which he's planning to release in August or thereabouts. It doesn't have a title yet, he says, and most of the vocals are just scratch vocals, he says, and they need a lot more in the way of engineering and polish, he says, and — "I'm feeling pretty vulnerable, man," he says.

There is a terrible weight borne by actors who decide that they might also be musicians. Even Jeff Bridges knows this to be true. It's as though a wall of voodoo separates the two professions, built over the course of a long and mostly torturous history of vanity projects and assaults against innocent and bleeding ears: William Shatner (The Transformed Man), Telly Savalas (Telly), Burt Reynolds (Ask Me What I Am), Tony Danza (The House I Live In), Don Johnson (The Essential). It blocks the opposite journey equally well — Mick Jagger, Sting, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Kelly Clarkson, Justin Guarini. It is the rare individual — Dwight Yoakam, Jennifer Hudson — who can jump over the wall at will.

"Oh, yeah," Bridges says. He pulls out a stick of incense and lights it. He holds it between his fingers and watches the whispers of smoke curl into the air.

Bridges made a record once before, in 2000, not long after he became an unlikely icon by playing the Dude in The Big Lebowski — not long after he earned the right to do pretty much whatever the hell he wanted. (He had resisted that role, too, worried that it was a bad example to set for his three daughters, shared with his lovely, diminutive North Dakotan wife of thirty-three years, a girl named Sue.) That record was called Be Here Soon. It was, like him, an eclectic collection of styles, a messy, unaffected blend of folk, rock, and soul. He'd worked hard on it, but no matter: It came and went pretty quickly. For the first time in his life, his imagination had failed him. His confidence had been shaken, and he was overtaken by nightmares more than dreams. He went back to the safer embrace of movies — The Contender and K-PAX came right around then.

But now, today, with his fingers running over the board, the incense still burning away, he has music in him again. Thanks to the guitar on the stand and his Oscar and encouragement from Burnett and others, he's decided to get it out, a different kind of poison. He sits with his legs spread out wide, like flying buttresses, his feet planted hard to the floor, as though he's worried he might collapse into himself. He takes a few steadying breaths.

"Okay," he says. "This one's called 'Gnat's World.' I wrote it one day when I was up on the mountain. It's, uh ... it's a little bit out there."

An ambient, white-noise stream comes out of the speakers, and then there's that unmistakable voice of his. Talking. Jeff Bridges is talking, like a stage-play mystic, like William Shatner, musing quite literally about the lives of the swarm of gnats he watched one day up on the mountain. "Is his name Earl?" he asks about one of the gnats, before he repeats the refrain "Gnat's world" over and over again, occasionally lifting into a high falsetto, "Gnat's world, Gnat's woooooorld."

Oh, no. He's a beautiful man, Jeff Bridges, and brave, and maybe there's something profound here that's bypassing black hearts and closed minds; he practices a little Buddhism, and he sees religion in things that the rest of us might ignore, and he is lucky for that. But "Gnat's World" is ... it's just ... oh, no.

At best, it's a weird bonus track that some hipster doofus will claim to like to seem different. At worst, it's the end of everything before it even gets a chance to start. Here is this man, maybe a great man, coming off the back-to-back-to-back successes of Crazy Heart, Tron: Legacy, and True Grit, a man who has reached that incredibly rare place where he doesn't have to look for the universe anymore. For the rest of his life, the universe will come to him.

But then — different songs come. They fill the room. And they're songs like his movies. They're what Bad Blake might have made, if Bad Blake had been able to keep it together. They're songs about loneliness and love and beauty and despair. "My tombstone will say," Bridges sings, "Born to be gone." They're songs that would sound terrific with the windows rolled down and the desert flashing by the fins. They're songs that rise and fall with the wail of gorgeous pedal steel and brushed snare drums and lilting, lovely guitar. They're really good songs.

And then it comes out, washing over him: "What a Little Love Can Do," the song that means so much to him — the song written by his lost friend Stephen Bruton — and Bridges is really singing through the speakers now, he's singing with his big full heart, and everything feels good. It feels as though the fog is rolling back down the mountain and the ocean and the universe are laying themselves out for him once again, ready and waiting. It feels as though Jeff Bridges really can do whatever the hell he wants — not because people will let him but because he can.

He's hopeful and he's smiling, really smiling, and suddenly he wants to show off something in his office, back inside the house. He's practically running across his driveway, past the gong hanging on a tree outside his enormous incredible house of stucco and Spanish tile. Bridges swats the gong with his hand whenever he passes it, and he swats it now and its crash shimmers through the leaves of the aloes.

His office is filled with artifacts. His helmet from the original Tron sits crooked on a shelf. A little sculpture depicting the thug pissing on his rug in The Big Lebowski spreads out on the floor. A painting of his father and photographs of his mother smile down at him. A collection of little clay heads that he made sits on a shelf in front of a long row of scripts from all of his movies bound in black leather. And there's a painting he did called "Jeff Makes a Decision," based on a dream he had: He's rowing a boat, surrounded by whirlpools, each of which has a diamond shining at the bottom, so many treasures, just sitting there, waiting for him, down, down, down.

He sits behind his desk, starts up his Mac, and begins scrolling through music and movie files. He stops whenever he sees someone he likes — Benji Hughes, Bo Ramsey, Greg Brown, Johnny Goodwin, peeking out from between Johns Fogerty and Hammond. Then he finds what he's looking for. He presses play.

And there's a video of Stephen Bruton, with a guitar in his hands, playing a song for his friend Jeff: "What a Little Love Can Do." He's playing it for the first time, and one Bridges watches Bruton on the screen and another from his chair behind his desk, the same smile on the face of each.

And then Bridges reaches behind his back for an acoustic guitar, and he begins to play. He doesn't even try to resist. It's terrifically sad, this sudden appearance of ghosts, but not if you know what Jeff Bridges knows. Bridges is just delighted to see his old friend again, all these years since they tore the living hell out of Montana. Oh, God. A few more chords and Bridges is long gone now, chasing diamonds all the way down to the bottom of the sea. He's imagining that his friend Stephen is back here with him, laughing and joking as though he'd never left, and they're playing a great song together, they're going to put out a record together this summer, their guitars and voices falling into perfect harmony. Bruton picks and hollers on the screen and out of the speakers, and Bridges continues to strum away on his guitar, and now he's belting it out, loud and unashamed, and his smile is sincere and wide. He is singing with his friend about love, love, love, and not one ounce of him is acting. Jeff Bridges has never acted a day in his life, at least not since he was a kid afraid of the dark. He only believes.